WorkFlowy as a writers tool...

This post by Brandon

(https://writingcooperative.com/how-i-use-workflowy-to-brainstorm-and-outline-short-stories-e94920ec3935)

got me thinking about using Workflow to not just brainstorm a book, but actually as a writing tool - much as a sort of cut down Scrivener (which everyone on the planet who writes would love!) - but there are just a few reasons I can't. 

Outline Sidebar: Ah but now we have a sidebar you might say, and surely you do, but it stays as an overview of the complete WorkFlowy organisation. I use WorkFlowy, as I am sure most do, to organise pretty much all my ideas on pretty much everything. So when I am writing the outline for a new text or book I only want to see that outline in the sidebar, not my entire WorkFlowy outline. So the sidebar should have a magnify feature exactly like the body area and when I click in the title of a new piece in the sidebar (say an article or book) I should be taken to just that outline and bullets within it as is the case, but the sidebar should also exactly reflect this. Obviously this should be a toggle in settings as most everyone else might not find it useful at all!

Bullets: And talking of bullets, I used to use a Safari extension called Stylish on my Mac, and in that I set-up a CSS (with your help WorkFlowy) to get rid of the bullets and leave just the outlining (and still show the menu when hovering over the bullet that wasn't actually visible). This meant I could not only outline a piece but then actually start writing it, as WorkFlowy looked just like a Word document with indented intelligent outlining! Ideal, and the flow was really useful as I could be writing in Part One/Chapter One and think of an idea I didn't want to expand there but did want an entire section on later. So I would jump to say Part Three/Chapter Two in the overall outline, magnify into that part of the outline and start writing my idea (before it as forgotten!). Sadly Stylish is no longer allowed in the latest Mac OS so I can no longer have a flow of text, broken into paragraphs without every damn line break thinking it need to be a new bulleted outline.

Bullets 2: And obviously, as WorkFlowy is not Word at some point the masterpiece written within it must be exported for proper ebook formatting - so an export with the same view as the WorkFowy list should also be available - at present you either get bullets or dashes where bullets where, not helpful!

That's it, this is a request I first started muting years ago, every few years I have another go, occasionally there are encouraging words but nothing happens. I'm not writing at the moment anyway, my previous ides are locked into several long and complicated WorkFlowy outlines that I can't export so I sort of just gave up.

Go on, encourage me, get me writing again! 😊